Illustration by Angelika Manhart

I knew I wanted to be a scientist when…

We ask students, postdocs, and faculty how they knew they wanted to be scientists. The results, archived here, represent a rich and diverse literature on the nature of scientific inspiration. These stories begin in China and India, in South America and in middle America, in small towns and big cities. They all prove the wisdom of Henry Adams’s observation that “any road was good that arrived.”